CLIMAVORE x Jameel at the Royal College of Art announces recipients of 2025 Food Action Awards at annual symposium

The announcement of the 2025 Food Action Awards was made at RCA Battersea during a special CLIMAVORE x Jameel at the RCA symposium, which provided a platform for a talk by eminent anthropologist and Associate Research Fellow at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, Dr Karine Peschard. Titled Seed Activism: Insights from the Seed Wars, the lecture traced the development of seed activism, from farmers’ rights in the 1980s to the GMO controversies of the 1990s, and the emergence of the seed sovereignty movement in the 2000s. Dr Peschard discussed a wide range of examples of seed activism to illustrate the remarkable diversity and creativity of the global movement, showing how seed activists have put forward new paradigms in our relationship to seeds based on open-source models, human rights law and the rights of nature framework, before addressing emerging challenges raised by digital sequencing and the extension of artificial intelligence to plant genetic engineering.

The Food Action Awards recognise projects that advance food systems in the new seasons of the climate crisis and build alternative diets that benefit human and non-human nourishing, led by international practitioners, collectives and researchers in the areas of architecture, visual arts, food studies, farming, queer ecologies, environmental humanities and related disciplines.

The first award, Research Action, consisting of £25,000, went to Museo Pelumpen for Trancestral Diet-ethics: NFTs for the Arts of Good Living. The project is recognised for its grounded and visionary approach to reconnecting ecological memory through food and forests in a region shaped by recurring wildfires and agro-industrial expansion. Based in Olmué and Limache, in Chile’s Valparaíso region, the work of the Museo Pelumpén collective revives ancestral relations with two heritage nitrogen-fixing trees (NFTs)—Vachellia caven (espino) and Neltuma chilensis (algarrobo)—whose pods produce high-protein flour once central to local diets before dismantled by colonisation and extractive agriculture. Through seed saving, agroforestry, community nurseries, and a “gastrosophic laboratory,” the project advances how culinary practices can act as a tool for living with increasing periods of drought and soil disruption.

The jury commended Museo Pelumpen for its integrity as a situated initiative that intertwines ecologies and food cultures old and new. They valued the project’s modest yet well-articulated manifestations, spanning agronomy, culinary experimentation, and educational tools. The jury also recognised its social and political ambition to find viable food practices in landscapes scarred by wildfires, drought, and chemical dependencies and praised the collective’s passionate commitment to living and working on the ground.

The Emerging Practice award for recent graduates of the Royal College of Art, carrying a prize of £15,000, went to Green Violence, an eco-feminist collective formed by Vedika Kushalappa (MA Information Experience Design), Claudia Lehmann (MA Environmental Architecture), and Sejal Dalvi (MA Curating Contemporary Art), for the project Non-Mono-Soon . Set in the Western Ghats of Southern India, the project investigates how colonial-era coffee plantations and ongoing monocultural farming in Coorg (Kodagu) have disrupted local ecologies, seasonal rhythms, and Indigenous land knowledge. Introduced to the area by the British East India Company, coffee cultivation displaced wetlands, fragmented forests, and undermined agro-biodiverse farming practices. Non-Mono-Soon proposes a community-led approach to regenerative land practices rooted in Kodava ancestral knowledge, including shade-grown polycultures and forest-wetland farming systems that adapt to the instability of today’s monsoons. Through interviews, participatory mapping, collaborative cooking, and field research with local growers, foresters and ecologists, the project challenges extractive food economies by exploring “slow harvests” rooted in rest, care, and forest connectivity.

The jury commended Green Violence for its sharp and timely approach, recognising its potential for lasting transformative impact. They valued the project’s roots in a collective formed by three RCA graduates from different disciplines, reflecting a strong spirit of collaboration and a thoughtful engagement with the challenges of contemporary practice. The project puts forward politically engaged themes and methodologies, while raising important questions about how to intervene meaningfully in today’s social and ecological landscapes.

The projects will start in summer 2025, and complete their work within 12 months with the support of CLIMAVORE x Jameel at the RCA.

The jury awarded an Honourable Mention to Gras a Sa for its powerful integration of agroecology, cultural memory, and climate justice. Led by artist Nathalie Muchamad and farmer Franswa Tibere, the project proposed to trace breadfruit as a crop resilient to the intensifying cyclones in La Réunion—reframing a food long burdened by colonial plantation stigma into a symbol of autonomy and liberation. With its broad canopy, adventitious roots, and high-yield fruiting, breadfruit is well-suited to island ecologies facing unstable soils and unpredictable weather. A single mature tree can produce up to 400 fruits annually, offering both nourishment and ecological stability. The jury recognised the strength of this long-term collaboration, its transoceanic and political connections across the Indian Ocean and beyond, and the critical role of artistic and culinary practice in re-signifying staple foods. The upcoming Breadfruit Festival in 2026, co-developed with the Food Art Research Network, exemplifies how storytelling, community organising, and ecological action can converge. The jury also valued the project’s engagement with nutritional concerns, particularly food security, diabetes prevention, and reducing dependencies on white rice imports—pressing issues for island communities across the Pacific and other postcolonial geographies.

Applications were received for projects across 36 countries, including Chile, Colombia, Iceland, India, Morocco, Mexico, Palestine and Zimbabwe. The jury was extremely pleased with the diversity and high quality of applications, their rigour and wide-ranging topics that address some of the most urgent questions around food justice and the climate crisis. The projects identified and addressed a range of human-made seasons that included: drought, wetland disappearance, monoculture, ‘invasive’ species, exhausted soils, and wildfires.

The Food Action Awards jury was chaired by Danielle Burrows (Director of Care, CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA) and consisted of: Cléa Daridan (Head of Arts and Culture, Community Jameel), Adrian Lahoud (Dean, School of Architecture, Royal College of Art), Boaventura Monjane (Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, PLAAS University of the Western Cape), Tracey McIntosh (Professor in Indigenous Studies, Wānanga o Waipapa | Faculty of Arts University of Auckland), Salma Tuqan (Director, Nottingham Contemporary), and Cooking Sections.

CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA reimagines foodways for drylands and wetlands in the climate crisis. It was launched in 2023 as a partnership between CLIMAVORE and Community Jameel developed at the RCA to advance ecological networks to produce new knowledge and action towards spatial justice.

On 21 May 2025, as part of the CLIMAVORE x Jameel at the RCA Monoculture Meltdown project, Cooking Sections (Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual) will open an exhibition of their work Rights to Seeds, Rights of Seeds at the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome. The artwork aims to preserve a living collection of diverse peasant seeds cultivated by farmers in southern Italy over generations and selected for their resilience to drought and heat stress. Monoculture Meltdown has been working with almost 40 farms and cooperatives across Sicilia and Puglia to cultivate and save seeds from 150 different peasant varieties of drought-resistant vegetables. A newly formed propagation protocol enables the seeds to be sent to Museo delle Civiltà, where they will be displayed in the installation over winter before being sent back out to farmers in the spring. In order to create a new cultural provenance to ease circulation and propagation, these peasant seeds will be stored within bespoke ceramic vessels during the months that they are displayed in the museum. The clay containers provide the ideal dry, dark and cool conditions to preserve seeds without inhibiting their future germination, and move away from seed banks into living collections.